UW, Seattle & King county join forces for new academic health department

The University of Washington Schools of Public Health and of Nursing have formalized an alliance with Public Health – Seattle & King County that seeks to encourage collaboration and resource sharing through a new academic health department. The three-year partnership will provide a foundation for increased training and other opportunities for students, faculty, researchers and staff of the participating organizations.

“Academic public health departments make for great collaboration. Our faculty and students can engage in meaningful service while being exposed to state-of-the-art public health work,” says Joel Kaufman, Interim Dean of the UW School of Public Health. “It’s another great example of how our School is involved in the community and not huddled in the ivory tower.”

Front and Centered, Urban@UW, the Climate Impacts Group and the UW School of Public Health & Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences are working on two climate and environmental justice research projects that will be completed later this year:

1) An environmental justice map of Washington State that overlays population vulnerabilities (e.g. health & income) with environmental burdens (e.g. toxics and air quality) to identify risk.
2) A report assessing the state of knowledge and needs for further research on equity and climate impacts across Washington State.

Join this interdisciplinary group February 21st, 2018 to learn about these projects and hear directly from communities about how they are experiencing climate change and what it means for them.This event is free and open to the public and will be held in the Health Sciences Building T-435. Please RSVP if you are interested in attending.

A central premise of Meeting of the Minds is that the flexibility, practicality, and focus of municipal governments make them ideal technological and social innovators. But can the ingenuity of U.S. cities be sufficiently amplified to effectively keep up with the pace of climate change, especially in the face of declining federal leadership?

Answering this question requires us to find the most effective scales for replicating urban progress. Metropolitan to regional scale programs can have the greatest impact, while household to district level projects are easiest to implement. Well-functioning cities and their staffs can help society achieve ambitious goals like reversing climate change and relieving global poverty, but that’s not what they are primarily paid to do. Instead, individual cities mostly aim their problem solving at local conditions. Fixing a pothole or increasing bus frequency can bring immediate relief to a neighborhood and kudos to a city council member.

Organizations like ICLEI and the US Conference of Mayors have long facilitated the sharing of these operational insights. As urban environmental issues have become more prominent, groups like the Urban Sustainability Directors’ Network and Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities have become more influential. With the advent of smart technology as an urban focus, new groups like MetroLab Network, Global City Teams Challenge, and the World Council on City Data are now emerging.

Recognizing that most of the world’s tech corridors are built around the innovation coming from two or more collaborating research universities, Microsoft has been funding enhanced connectivity between UW and UBC through the Cascadia Urban Analytics Cooperative. The schools are now using this framework to actively expand research links in transportation, housing, public health, genomics, and law, as well as growing parallel training programs in “Data Science for Social Good.”

The Doorway project’s second pop-up cafe

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Save The Date: The Doorway Project’s second pop-up cafe will be open on Sunday February 25, from 2:00pm-4:00pm at the University Heights Center, 5031 University Way NE, Seattle, WA 98105. Everyone is welcome to attend this free, family-friendly event to listen to live music, enjoy warm beverages and food. No one will be turned away for lack of funds. Learn about some of the efforts to end youth homelessness in the U district! Find out more at the Doorway Project

The struggle for environmental justice in low-income and Black communities continues. This is most certainly the case in Orlando, Florida. In the heart of one of the premier tourist destinations in the United States, the theme park capital of America, the residents of a historically Black community are having trouble breathing due to air pollution — reflecting a nationwide problem.

The community in question is the predominantly Black neighborhood of Parramore in Orlando, Florida, one of the city’s poorest communities, as HuffPost reported. The Griffin Park federal housing project is completely boxed in by highways — Interstate 4 and State Road 408 — and air pollution from over 300,000 cars per day. Trees that would have protected against the noxious fumes of automobiles have been cut down. In Parramore, once a thriving Black middle-class area founded in the 1880s, years of railroad and highway construction, segregation and relocation of residents to Griffin Park have surrounded the community and exacerbated the environmental issues it faces.

As the Orlando Sentinel reported, “Griffin Park is a planner’s nightmare — a neighborhood encircled by roads and subjected to noise and pollution 24 hours a day. From a historical standpoint, it’s unsurprising.” The median household income is now $13,613, and childhood poverty is 73 percent, with many children suffering from chronic health problems. Residents suffer from cancer, asthma and other respiratory conditions, and have urged officials to pay attention to their environmental health concerns. City authorities say they will conduct a health assessment of the area in the next five years as part of a beautification plan that is set to include green spaces.

A study released in 2017 by University of Washington researchers found that little progress has been made in bridging the gap between the exposure of people of color versus whites to harmful air pollution from combustible sources. The study, which examined levels of the transportation-related pollutant nitrogen dioxide (NO2) between 2000 and 2010 found that disparities in exposure was greater based on race and ethnicity than by age, education and income.

Does the big boss really matter in big-city school districts?

School district superintendents are often nice people, but boring. They rarely have much effect on what happens in classrooms, where the most interesting and productive changes occur. But because the nation’s two largest districts, New York and Los Angeles, are looking for new superintendents, I forced myself to read a trenchant new guide for superintendent success by two scholars who think the man or woman at the top is important.

Can Paul Hill and Ashley Jochim of the University of Washington save NYC and LA from fractious politics and stopgap solutions? Probably not. But they offer enough shrewd insights to help us decide whether new superintendents in those cities and your city have any hope of progress.

What you do at the UW and what led you to your current research interests?

The main thing I study and teach about is the role and interaction of nonprofits with government, both through advocacy and in public service delivery, primarily in the fields of low-income housing and homelessness. Before getting my Ph.D., I worked locally at the Housing Development Consortium of Seattle-King County. That’s where I first got involved in housing and homelessness issues.

How do your current research interests intersect with urban issues?

There are nonprofits in all communities, but there is a concentration of nonprofits in urban areas, due to concentrations of funding, and of people who are interested and want to make an impact. For homelessness as well as other social services, government has a long history of delivering public programs through nonprofits, so it is an interesting research context because we have a lot of public money going to nonprofits to deliver the actual programs.

How has your research in homelessness informed your teaching?

When I teach nonprofit management, I often use homelessness as the example of how the public and nonprofits are working together to try to tackle a very difficult issue. Also, innovation often comes from the nonprofit sector as they try new approaches to alleviate homelessness, and these ideas are sometimes adopted or integrated into broader policy. We saw that with the Housing First strategy, which was really pioneered by nonprofits then shown to be effective, and now it’s pretty standard that governments are supportive of and trying to help expand that strategy in their own programs. Also, I teach policy analysis, and homelessness is a very interesting case to think about what you can do to address problems within the constraints of policy. If you are a city government, there is only so much you can do: you only have so much money, you only have so much control, and yet you want to be able to make a difference. And homelessness is an example where you can find hundreds of meaningful programs that might make a difference, and as a policymaker you have to choose how you are going to use your limited resources and expertise.

How do you think about the use of data or evidence when making policy changes?

I think that statistics as well as qualitative data—getting at the mechanisms underlying programs—are very important to provide feedback to policymakers, nonprofits implementing the programs, and the program participants themselves, to evaluate if this is the right way forward. I absolutely think that data and evaluation are important, because these are public dollars and we want to be as smart as we can when using that money.

Based on your work, what do you believe is the most effective approach to address homelessness in Seattle?

I think we need a lot more housing. From my perspective, homelessness is fundamentally a problem of housing affordability, and while people experiencing homelessness experience a lot of other challenges aside from housing affordability, the lack of housing is the thing that defines them as homeless. And right now, Seattle is one of the fastest growing cities in this country and it’s very difficult to build housing at the same rate that people arrive. We need not just more housing, but also a mindful use of policy tools to help match the kind of housing that’s being built with what people need. For example, one-bedroom units won’t really have a meaningful impact on families who are trying to stay together or may otherwise be pushed out of Seattle. We need more housing across the spectrum to make sure that we are not creating a city that only includes certain types of people or households.

What do you see for the future of research and policy-making in homelessness?

We want to believe that we are learning from our experiences and not making the same mistakes over and over, and that we are finding more ways to be innovative and adapt to new challenges. I think we are getting smarter; I think that there has been some really good research recently done on a national scale that is influencing policy conversations. But, because of the quick pace that policy can be passed compared to the slow pace of research, sometimes we move forward with policies that have not been researched fully, and there isn’t really a way around that. I hope there is a dedication to following those policies to make sure we’re learning about them as they are being rolled out, even if we don’t know beforehand how they will work.

What role do partnerships play in adding value to your work?

A lot of the research that I have been involved in has been with the Downtown Emergency Service Center, which is one of the largest nonprofit service providers in the city. One of our projects also collaborates with Pathways to Housing, and another researcher from DePaul University, so a really collaborative effort. Another project that we’re working on, with Urban@UW, is a survey of student experiences with housing or food insecurity. For that project, which we are implementing next month, we are connecting with faculty and staff on all 3 UW campuses, looking to see what we can learn in a systematic way about the experiences about housing and food insecurity among our own student body.

If you were to recommend one book to an aspiring urban scholar, what would it be?

Well, if you want to know about housing policy then “Housing Policy in the United States” is the text book I have used in my class. It can be it is a very dense read but the field is extremely complex, and that book is a great introduction for anyone who wants to get in the weeds of housing policy while still understanding the scope. Everything from housing authorities to vouchers to nonprofit subsidized developments, to homelessness programs, to foreclosures, everything, so I have to recommend that book.

Shocker: It’s mostly men moving to Seattle for tech jobs

For every four men who moved to Seattle for a tech job in the last decade, only one woman did, too, according to a recent analysis that looked at the trend of tech transplants nationwide.To industry experts and academics, the findings from the careers website Paysa.com came as no surprise. The data is more of the same — evidence of a gender void in the technology sector that has been well-documented but is slow to change.

Amid a social push for hiring reforms in recent years, Microsoft in 2015 was hit with a lawsuit accusing it of gender bias in its hiring practices. Facing public pressure around the same time, several major tech companies disclosed their workforce demographics — proving what many already perceived: The industry heavily favored men.“Unfortunately, it’s not shocking at all,” Ed Lazowska, a computer science professor at the University of Washington, said of Paysa’s findings. “This is a field that has a tremendous gender imbalance.”

Margaret O’Mara, a history professor at UW who specializes in the history of tech, said it will take time to see the cultural shift that recent awareness has sparked. Although more people are seeking careers in tech, the overall proportion of women in the field is declining, she said.

Should Seattle declare war on parking to fight climate change?

Make no mistake: The rising cost and declining amount of on-street parking downtown are part of a much bigger plan to reduce Seattle’s carbon footprint.University of Washington traffic engineer Mark Hallenbeck is adamant that Seattle should not go down the same road as Oslo. “Removing parking might have an environmental benefit, but the backlash from it might be so bad,” he said, that drivers will be up in arms, and they’ll punish elected officials for it.

But Hallenback admits there may be a case for phasing out on-street parking in parts of Seattle, if it means a better future with more options and more transit mobility. “Do I get bus lanes, bus rapid transit that actually moves and isn’t stuck?” he asks, “you’ll get way more people in the bus because people can zoom through the city on that bus.”

May HQ2 be ever in your favor: Amazon’s new short list pits 20 cities against each other

Amazon’s decision to establish a second and equal corporate headquarters outside of Seattle made the company an object of desire and scorn simultaneously, as cities were suddenly pitted against one another for the $5 billion prize.

And while the 20 candidates that made Amazon’s HQ2 short list last Thursday are likely celebrating, the decision to publicly narrow the field isn’t going to assuage any concerns that Amazon is staging its own Hunger Games, and using cities in need of economic development as the contestants.

“In an age where cities and states are starved for resources, often times these efforts at economic development, the costs of tax breaks for the city, will far outweigh whatever benefits come from the number of jobs created,” Margaret O’Mara, a University of Washington History professor specializing in urban history, told GeekWire this past September.

New book ‘City Unsilenced’ explores protest and public space

Jeff Hou is a professor of landscape architecture and adjunct professor of urban design and planning in the University of Washington’s College of Built Environments. His research, teaching and practice focus on community design, design activism, cross-cultural learning and engaging marginalized communities in planning and design.

Hou states, “with public space playing such an important role for freedom of speech and assembly and for holding institutions accountable to the public, the fight for public space is also a fight for democracy that protects equity and justice around the world.”

Cities face a surge in online deliveries

By the time veteran UPS driver Thomas “Tommy” Chu leaves work, he will have picked up and delivered hundreds of packages in New York City, making some 16 stops an hour as his company hurries to meet the online shopping rush. But what may be his most impressive feat of the day precedes that scramble: at precisely 10:02 am, Mr Chu snags a parking spot. This is no small victory in midtown Manhattan, where one survey found truck drivers can spend as long as 60 minutes circling for a space. Often, drivers simply give up and risk a ticket. “Most times, you have no choice. If there’s no parking, you have to double park,” Mr Chu says.

Double-parked trucks, red brake lights and cardboard boxes littering the sidewalk: this is what the growth of online shopping looks like on the ground in America’s largest city - and not just here. Parcel volumes surged almost 50% globally between 2014-2016, according to estimates from Pitney Bowes. They are on track to increase at rates of 17-28% annually up to 2021.

Skid Road: The intersection of health and homelessness

After years of caring for the homeless in the streets and dilapidated motels of Richmond, Virginia, nurse Josephine Ensign became homeless herself.

Many of her patients were prostitutes—some as young as 15—and her conscience no longer allowed her to adhere to her clinic’s policies. Though she was Christian, she was fired for referring many of these women for abortions, for not making AIDS patients “account for their sins” before they died, and “no longer being a Christian woman with a humble and teachable spirit.”

UW’s Doorway Project kicks off services for homeless youth

The University District community includes as much as one-third of King County’s homeless youth over any given year. It’s a neighborhood where a food bank and youth shelter are available, and where young people on the streets can blend in.

Now the University of Washington, in a partnership among Urban@UW, faculty, students and community service agencies – and with $1 million in state funding over two years – is launching The Doorway Project, an effort to establish a neighborhood hub and navigation center specifically for homeless young people. The Doorway Project will bring youth in the U District together with UW faculty and students to develop plans for a hub starting with a pop-up café on Dec. 3 in the parking lot of the University Heights Community Center – the first of four such events that organizers hope will lead to plans for permanent site next year.

“A public university has a mandate to have a larger impact on these kinds of problems,” said Josephine Ensign, a professor in the UW School of Nursing and coordinator of The Doorway Project. “But it shouldn’t be an ivory tower, think-tank solution; it needs to involve public scholarship, informed by the public and impacting the public.”

What if a 9.0-magnitude earthquake hit Seattle?

In preparation for the BIG ONE — the mighty 9.0-magnitude earthquake that’s expected to lay waste to the Pacific Northwest — geophysicists have created 50 virtual simulations to see how such a quake could rattle the region.

The simulations don’t paint a pretty picture for Seattle or the coastal areas of Washington, Oregon, British Columbia and Northern California, but the locations of some epicenters were a bit more forgiving than others.

“People have done simulations like this in the past, but they only did one or two,” said study lead researcher and Affiliate Assistant Professor Erin Wirth, who did the project while a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Earth and Space Sciences at the University of Washington. “In running 50 [simulations], we were trying to show the full range of possibilities by varying all these parameters.”

What are your current research interests at the University of Washington?

I am a research associate professor in the Department of Architecture, and I work in a small group called the Integrated Design Lab. We focus on ideas around high-performance buildings. What we think of as high-performance buildings are those that are both energy efficient and embody high quality attributes for people. Whether it’s for living or healing or learning, or any other aspect for how we use buildings.

How do high-performance buildings fit in the context of urban systems?

Buildings are a big part of how the fabric of urban environments come together. While we at IDL think about the building scale, this intersects with the community scale as well as a smaller scale within the building. People perceive their environments in multiple scales and we’re always thinking about those intersections.

How has research in your field has changed over the years?

In the last 10 years there’s become a greater emphasis on the importance of energy and energy efficiency, especially as it relates to sustainability and the larger issue of greenhouse gases. The expertise that we have about how to make buildings better informs how we make our urban built environment better, both for the people that are inhabiting it right now as well as for future generations. It’s about people’s health and atmospheric health.

What do you like most about the work that you do?

One of the important aspects, and one that I enjoy the most about my research is that I work with a lot of practitioners in the design and construction field. I help them apply their research findings and also learn what other issues need to be researched or what questions they have that could be addressed. I enjoy this reciprocal relationship of research and its actual application.

How important is data for addressing challenges in your field?

Really important when forming an understanding of a problem and then understanding how to solve that problem. It helps inform decision making, rather than a gut instinct of what may be right or wrong. It’s one of the reasons that we talk about high-performance buildings rather than green buildings: the definition of the former implies a measurable outcome, which to me is rooted in data or fact.

How does your work inform policy?

Policy is really important in the energy efficiency and building space generally, to move the whole market forward to a better design standard. Our work informs policy by shedding light on what’s a reasonable advance in the codes and standards for buildings. For example, after a building is constructed, we can look back and see how the building is actually performing and ask, does that match expectations. When we look at a new disclosure ordinance for example, where buildings are required to disclose their energy usage, this data is mapped, building by building, on publicly accessible maps so everyone knows how buildings are performing, which creates a collective and an incentive to shift policy.

What kind of partnerships do you engage in through your work?

One of the things that we do a lot is collaborate with stakeholders in the design and construction space. That includes a lot of architects, engineers, contractors, and owners of buildings. We do it in a lot of different ways, sometimes they are research partnerships, sometimes we are working on actual design projects, sometimes we’re working on codes and policies, or general knowledge building. This is again based on the reciprocal relationship between research and the application of research through real projects, and it is a conversation that is always continuing. Our research will inform how buildings get built and being part of a design team that’s actually designing a building helps inform our research initiatives.

Do you partner with other disciplines here at UW?

We partner with other faculty across the University of Washington. I think it’s important to have different points of view, different sets of expertise and skills in order to solve these really difficult problems together. Communication between disciplines can be challenging, due to difficulty in understanding each other’s specific language and vocabulary. How we think about and look at data is different. It’s a challenge but it’s an exciting space too, once we communicate with each other and figure out how to best utilize our skills so we are on the same page. In the energy-efficiency space, a lot of the technical challenges are surmountable, but challenges lie in process, finances and how people work together. There is value in better communicating what experts in the UW are doing and opening the dialogue between different disciplines on campus, and I think that’s the purpose of Urban@UW. It’s good to share people’s stories about what we’re working on, what works, what’s challenging and how we might be able to better help each other.

If you could give aspiring urban scholars a piece of advice, what would it be?

Keep your mind open to what your opportunities might be, because you never know what will present itself, and it might surprise you what you become interested in!

Written by Shahd Al Baz, Urban@UW Communications Assistant

What counts as nature? It all depends

The environment we grow up with informs how we define “nature,” UW psychology professor Peter Kahn says. Encounters with truly wild places inspire people to preserve them.Think, for a moment, about the last time you were out in nature. Were you in a city park? At a campground? On the beach? In the mountains?

Now consider: What was this place like in your parents’ time? Your grandparents’? In many cases, the parks, beaches and campgrounds of today are surrounded by more development, or are themselves more developed, than they were decades ago. But to you, they still feel like nature.

These Are the Countries Where Air Pollution Is the Deadliest

New Delhi has been engulfed in smog for days. It’s an issue that arises in the Indian capital each year as smoke from illegal crop burning, vehicle exhaust emissions and construction dust fill the air, but health officials say the problem has intensified this year.

India isn’t the only nation that is adversely affected by rising levels of pollution, from contaminated water to dirty air. Pollution, which causes heart attacks, strokes, lung cancer and respiratory diseases, “is the largest environmental cause of disease and premature death in the world today,” according to an October study on the health effects of pollution in the The Lancet medical journal. Toxic exposure cost $4.6 trillion and caused 9 million premature deaths – 6.5 million just from air pollution – in 2015, the study estimated.

Check out the 10 countries listed with the highest mortality rates (per 100,000 people) associated with air pollution in 2016, according to data from UW’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. Urban areas are often particularly hard hit by air pollution.

Can Seattle rezone away the racial divide in housing?

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For generations, Seattle was segregated through racist neighborhood covenants, deed restrictions, even banking policies designed to keep certain minorities out of largely white enclaves.Yet nearly 50 years after the landmark Fair Housing Act sought to reverse that legacy, the city remains strikingly separated along color lines.

A Seattle Times analysis shows that areas dedicated to single-family houses remain the city’s most exclusive havens. If you live in North Capitol Hill or Sunset Hill/Loyal Heights single-family zones, you have more than 100 white neighbors for every black one. Much of North Seattle, however, “remained in 2010 almost as exclusively white as it had been 50 years earlier,” according to the University of Washington’s Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project. Racist practices were not confined to single-family zones, the project noted, “they covered nearly all residential housing in the region.”

Frances McCue meditates on changing city in new poem collection ‘Timber Curtain’

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“This is Seattle. A place to love whatever’s left,” writes UW faculty member Frances McCue in her new book of poetry, “Timber Curtain.” “(W)here new things are coming, shinier than the last / I’m the bust standing in the boom / the poet in the technology world / spread along the timber bottom” — from the poem “Along With the Dead Poet Richard Hugo.”

McCue, a well-known area poet, teacher and self-dubbed “arts instigator,” is a senior lecturer in the UW Department of English. She was a co-founder of Richard Hugo House, at 1634 11th Ave. in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, and served as its director from 1996 to 2006. The original Hugo House — a place for writers — was demolished in 2016; it now has a new temporary home at 1021 Columbia St. while the venue awaits new digs.

Homeownership can come with a hefty supply of emotions, paperwork and financial planning. And as one grows more attached to a residence over the years, feelings often deepen as house becomes home and memories start to accumulate.

“In 2015, Seattle and King County each declared a homelessness State of Emergency. Both have made commendable efforts since then to intensify outreach, coordinate services, facilitate permanent housing and expand safe temporary shelter options. However, these efforts are still too little and too slow.

The 2017 “Count Us In” homeless tally identified 3,857 people living without shelter in Seattle. In 2017, Seattle added two shelters and three permitted encampments, which have the ability to serve 385 people. Amazon contributed space to shelter 200 women, children and families. Still, thousands of unsheltered neighbors continue to live in scattered overhangs, tents, vehicles and empty buildings.”

Developing ‘breakaway’ tsunami resistant buildings

The best designs can also be the most surprising. A promising new concept for tsunami resistant buildings features breakaway walls and floors on lower levels that, when removed by forceful waves, strengthen the structure and better protect occupants seeking safety on higher floors.

Homeless artists showcase work at UW

One way to humanize the homeless is through art. “Telling our stories: art and home(lessness)” is a show Oct. 11-Dec. 15 featuring the work of six artists living in a low-barrier supportive housing project. They are part of an artists’ collective developed out of collaboration with University of Washington researchers, the Downtown Emergency Service Center and residents at 1811 Eastlake, a low-barrier supportive housing project.

Best answer to Seattle affordability may win the race for mayor

The rising cost of housing is a dominant issue in Seattle’s mayoral election, but political messaging – on trust, results and leadership – could also move voters in the race between Jenny Durkan and Cary Moon.It’s a race away from a scandal and a race to become Seattle’s first woman mayor in about 90 years, a race about beating traffic and beating back President Donald Trump.

Most voters just want to know how their own block will be affected by the election result, said Jeff Shulman, a University of Washington Associate professor in the Foster School of Busines who hosts a podcast about the city’s growth. The candidate who can better explain what people will get in return for accepting development in their neighborhood will stand a good chance on Election Day, he said.“People are trying to figure out what growth means to them,” Shulman said. “What they’re losing and what they could be getting,” like a new library or community center.

As part of its recently launched Homelessess Research Initiative, Urban@UW has collaborated with faculty and staff across all three UW campuses to compile a broad-ranging selection of powerful and robust projects addressing homelessness from a research lens. Check out the Faculty Highlights Report to learn more about these efforts and the people behind them.

The Faculty Highlights Report was developed by Urban@UW’s Homelessness Research Initiative.

In Seattle, cost of meeting basic needs up $30,000 in a decade

A Seattle family of four must bring in $75,000 annually to pay for basic housing, food, transportation and health and child care – an increase of 62 percent since 2006, based on a new report from the University of Washington.

The city’s escalating cost of living may not be a surprise. But across the state, the amount of money required to make ends meet for two adults, a preschooler and a school-age child has risen as well, according to the Self-Sufficiency Standard for Washington State 2017. When compared to 2001, the first year the Self-Sufficiency Standard was calculated, costs for that same family of four have increased an average of 59 percent statewide.

Many older buildings provide vital, low-cost housing. But we must find a way to make these structures safer. It should not be acceptable to us to subject our fellow citizens to such hazardous conditions.

ONCE again we are reminded of the deadly potential of powerful earthquakes. We are confronted by images from Mexico of collapsed buildings, volunteers searching the rubble for survivors and parents facing their worst nightmare.

As earthquake engineers, we see the failure to address the well-known vulnerabilities of older, brick buildings (unreinforced masonry) and brittle reinforced concrete construction. These heavy and brittle older buildings lack the strength and details necessary to prevent collapse in large earthquakes. The images from Mexico also remind us of society’s responsibility to protect its most vulnerable members, including children and those without the economic resources to improve the safety of the buildings in which they live.

CUAC holds fall symposium to identify research projects

Image Credit: Emily F. Keller

To understand trends in housing affordability, neighborhood change and multi-modal transportation systems in the Cascadia region, researchers, public agencies and community stakeholders are taking a multifaceted view.

Examining urban ecology and migration patterns, homelessness and development in relation to transit network planning and population health indicators was the subject of discussion at the Cascadia Urban Analytics Cooperative (CUAC) Fall Symposium September 11-12, 2017. The event took place at the University of Washington (UW), following the CUAC Summit at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in July.

Many states and localities throughout the U.S. have adopted higher minimum wages, and higher labor costs among low-wage food system workers could result in higher food prices. However, this study finds no evidence of change in supermarket food prices by market basket or increase in prices by food group in response to the implementation of Seattle’s minimum wage ordinance. This paper is part of a broader Minimum Wage Study at the University of Washington.

People of color exposed to more pollution from cars, trucks, power plants during 10-year period

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A new nationwide study finds that the U.S. has made little progress from 2000 to 2010 in reducing relative disparities between people of color and whites in exposure to harmful air pollution emitted by cars, trucks and other combustion sources.

The groundbreaking study led by University of Washington Professor of Civil and Environmental EngineeringJulian Marshall estimated exposure to outdoor concentrations of a transportation-related pollutant — nitrogen dioxide (NO2) — in both 2000 and 2010, based on neighborhoods where people live. It found disparities in NO2 exposure were larger by race and ethnicity than by income, age or education, and that relative inequality persisted across the decade.

Pacific Northwest business and political leaders on both sides of the Canada-US border announced a series of agreements to strengthen relationships between Seattle, Portland, Vancouver B.C. and the surrounding areas.

The new partnerships, made ahead of the second Cascadia Innovation Corridor conference in Seattle this week, focus on technology, economic development, education and transportation. Government officials, universities, companies and research institutions are participating in the effort, which is meant to bring together the regions that have a lot in common but are separated by an international border.

One of the most intriguing ideas that came out of last year’s conference was a vision to build high-speed trains that would travel between Seattle and Vancouver in less than an hour. That idea is still alive and well. Microsoft kicked in $50,000 to supplement the state of Washington’s $300,000 budget to study the plan.

Storefront Studio creates vision for downtown block

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Three graduate students and their professor from the University of Washington College of Built Environments spent much of this summer visiting Gig Harbor and creating a plan that could change and enhance an area in the downtown waterfront business district.

The Storefront Studio Project, as the endeavor is called, began in June when the students met with a group of about 50 business owners, residents, members of the Downtown Waterfront Alliance and others for a brainstorming session, led by UW Architecture Professor Jim Nicholls. The students took extensive notes as the group discussed issues they feel are important to the community and especially to the historic waterfront area.This is the second Storefront Studio Project the Waterfront Alliance has sponsored in Gig Harbor.

College of Built Environments’ David de la Cruz partners with communities for environmental justice

David de la Cruz

David de la Cruz has a question about power. “When we think about toxic sites and where they’re placed in relation to where people live, who’s left out of making those decisions?” “Often,” he answers, “it’s the people who live there. It’s low-income communities, working-class communities and communities of color who don’t have a say. They’re the ones who have to deal with the consequences of living close to a grain mill facility that constantly sees truck traffic, or living close to a yard that has trains passing back and forth.”

And while these communities have some autonomy, he says, people are moving into areas that are already extensively polluted. There’s often no decision to be made — pollution is part of the package. Where you live affects how you live.

‘Smart’ campuses invest in the Internet of Things

As campus executives start to develop their IoT strategies, it is not just CIOs who have to be involved. Sometimes, facilities groups have their own IT executives working on data pipelines from IoT devices. Chuck Benson, assistant director for IT in Facilities Services at the University of Washington, chairs a campuswide IoT risk mitigation task force.

Energy management is a great example of where IoT is having an impact, Benson said. With help from a federal grant, UW has made an effort to meter much of the campus. There are about 2,000 data points where power and building controls are sampled. “I work with our energy conservation managers making sure all the samples are coming through,” he said. Data flows into an aggregation point and from there to consumption for reports, dashboards or ongoing research.

UW student Jessica Hamilton receives 2017 ASLA student honor award

Jessica Hamilton, a recent graduate of UW Department of Landscape Architecture, received the prestigious American Society of Landscape Architects Student Honor Award in the Communications Category for the Tactile MapTile project: an innovative interdisciplinary work combining big data, additive manufacturing, and pedestrian-centric landscape architecture. The project is a collaboration between the Taskar Center for Accessible Technology (housed by the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science) and UW Landscape Architecture (College of Built Environments) under the sponsorship of Urban@UW.

Each year ASLA honors the best in landscape architecture from around the globe. Recipients receive featured coverage in Landscape Architecture Magazine, the magazine of ASLA, and in many other design and construction industry and general interest media. Jessica, and her advisers, Anat Caspi, Ben Spencer and Thaisa Way, will be honored at the awards presentation ceremony during the ASLA Annual Meeting and EXPO in Los Angeles, October 20-23, 2017.

Tactile MapTile employs a unique tactile based representation of pedestrian-centric features in a map to enhance the spatial understanding for people with broad visual capacities. Each feature is represented by a different texture and pattern tactile design. Users with broad visual abilities can use the interface to customize and generate 3D map models based on their choice of location and which features to include.

My work focuses on issues of poverty place and safety-net participation. Historically, poverty problems have been concentrated in the cities of the US; even today as the majority of poor people in our metro areas live in the suburbs, poverty rates remain much higher in cities. Problems of poverty are also much more persistent in cities, and often more racially segregated in cities than in suburban or other areas.

What led you to studying poverty?

When I was a college student, my dad lost his job. He didn’t have a college degree and he struggled to find work for a long time. Around this time I took a class in social policy and later started to do research with the professor. And I thought, if I did work that advanced our understanding of the safety net and how society could better provide help, we could help workers who have a hard time finding or keeping jobs. It seemed if I could do research around poverty and policy, it had the potential to help folks – like my Dad—who struggled sometimes to make ends meet.

How do you think research in poverty has changed over the years?

I think we have a better understanding today of the many factors that lead families to have income near or below the poverty line. We also have a better understanding of which programs best help families escape poverty or weather periods of hardship, and of what it takes to help workers without advanced education or training to find and keep good paying jobs. I also think we understand more of the racial and ethnic inequalities that underlie a lot of our poverty problems, although there remains much we need to know about inequality in the US.

What other fields of study do you regularly work with?

My work is very interdisciplinary. I draw on the work of sociologists, economists, political scientists, public health and social work, and sometimes urban planning and design. My interest in cross-disciplinary research also leads me to engage practitioners and policy-makers from a variety of different sectors whether that’s at the federal level, in state agencies or local government, or locally based non profit agencies. This outreach is something I’m working on these days, as I’m relatively new to Seattle and look forward to opportunities around issues of social service provision and poverty programming.

What would you say are the top challenges facing cities today? One of the biggest challenges today is the shifts in the labor market, where we’re creating many high-paying jobs that require a lot of education and training, and then we’re creating an abundance of low-paying jobs that don’t require a lot of advanced training. This leads to not only income inequality but also difficulties for people with less access to education and training to earn enough to provide the basics for their families.

Second, research clearly points to committing resources to early childhood education, and I think cities face significant challenges in dedicating resources to public education that supports kids from birth through college.

Last, many metro areas face both traffic gridlock problems but also limited access to and availability of public transit options. As cities become more dense and in many ways more vibrant places, solving those transportation problems is important for families across the income spectrum.

What do you see for the future of poverty research and policy-making? Right now we live in a politicized environment, which doesn’t take evidence seriously in policy debates. I worry that today’s ideological divides create a lot of challenges for researchers, policymakers, and for advocates who are interested in the value of evidence to improve programs and policies. Even though there may be limited interest in poverty policy at the federal level now, there is lots of opportunity with states and local governments to develop and study new tools or solutions, or to experiment with new programs.

So, gathering good data seems key to addressing poverty challenges.

When we don’t have good data about the nature of our poverty problems its hard for us to develop effective interventions. We risk pursuing policies or programs that either have no effect or unintended consequences. Low-income households don’t deserve just any program or policy; they deserve programs and policies that will work, and that will increase opportunity. We have an obligation to weigh objective evidence when we make policy that affects the most vulnerable families in our community.

What led you to UW?

One of the reasons I was attracted to UW and the Evans School—I moved here from the University of Chicago a few years ago—was of the large number of scholars in various departments interested in urban issues. I’m excited to see how the work of the university and the Urban@UW community continue to evolve together. I hope in the coming years we develop insights and solutions that will help the region tackle the many challenges it faces.

If you could give aspiring urban scholars a piece of advice, what would it be?

Spend time in communities engaging with local organizations. Spend time with families and case workers, program managers on the grounds.That kind of street-level perspective helps you not only identify important questions, it also helps makes sure that you’re answering those questions with integrity and with a grounding in real-world experience. Its easy for us to study urban problems far removed from the communities that are vulnerable. Rolling up our sleeves and spending time in neighborhoods and communities is critical to developing inclusive and culturally competent solutions.

Thank you!

Written by Shahd Al Baz, Urban@UW Communications Assistant

Why Seattle is poised to be a leader in ‘smart city’ technology and regulations

New technology is helping local government create “smarter” cities in a variety of ways, from adaptive traffic lights to open data platforms to advanced utility meters. But with innovation comes complication. Privacy, security, and equality challenges are inevitable when the public sector tries to implement technology with the help of private companies.

This was the subject of a roundtable discussion hosted by U.S. Rep. Suzan DelBene (D-WA) at the University of Washington on Wednesday in Seattle.

The hour-long meeting hosted by Urban@UW and UW eScience institute brought together key regional leaders from a variety of sectors: City of Seattle CTO Michael Mattmiller; Seattle Public Utilities CEO Mami Hara; Socrata CEO Kevin Merritt; Microsoft Government Solutions Manager Mike Geertsen and others — to talk about the role of government in establishing policies and processes that enable the modernization of cities.

More than one-third of drivers in Seattle are either searching for parking or are ridesharing drivers waiting for ride assignments. That’s according to a study by a group of University of Washington students looking at traffic sensor data. The four students involved called this practice of searching for parking or rides “cruising.” The project used 63 sensors that already scattered through downtown Seattle. Student Orysya Stus said the team used a complicated process of machine learning. As they looked at the data, they threw out some of the trips—many of which were too short to understand. After that, they found that 35 percent of what was left was “cruising.” They estimate that about 10 percent of those were Transportation Network Company (TNC) drivers waiting for an assignment to pick up someone. Uber and Lyft are examples of TNCs. “It translates to a lot of fuel wasted per year, lots of wasted time,” Michael Vlah, another team member, said of cruising.

Why Architects should care about public health

Andrew Dannenberg, an Affiliate Professor at the School of Public Health and the College of Built Environments, writes about the importance of architects recognizing human health: while architects have long recognized the importance of human health —including physical, mental, and social well-being — as part of their mission, implementation sometimes reflects a spirit of compliance more than of aspiration. Design that is limited to preventing harm by meeting building codes and standards forfeits the full range of design possibilities that could enhance the health and quality of life of a building’s occupants and visitors. There are many major societal trends for which architects can contribute health-promoting improvements: obesity, housing and social inequities, an aging population, hazardous chemical exposures, urbanization, nature contact deficit, energy poverty, water shortages and excesses, natural disasters, and climate change.

UW gets federal money to boost early-warning system for West Coast earthquakes

The U.S. Geological Survey has awarded $4.9 million to six universities and a nonprofit to help advance an early-warning system for earthquakes along the West Coast. The federal agency says the ShakeAlert system could give people seconds or up to a minute of warning before strong shaking begins. The University of Washington, Central Washington University and University of Oregon are among those receiving grants. Congress provided $10.2 million to the USGS earthquake hazards program earlier this year.

Opportunity abounds as Washington builds the modern electricity grid

The Horn Rapids Solar, Storage, and Training Project—which would be the largest solar installation in Washington, and one of a relative few anywhere with a significant amount of energy storage incorporated—embodies a long chain of public and private sector efforts that have positioned the state, and the broader Pacific Northwest, as a leader in the grid modernization and energy storage industries.

Grid modernization—a broader term for what is also called smart grid—presents a large economic development opportunity for the region, supporting up to 13,800 jobs in Washington by 2030, as companies meet growing global demand for products and services needed to create electricity systems that are more dynamic, decentralized, flexible, and clean, according to a recent report from the American Jobs Project. The old-line grid, in which large centralized power plants—often coal-or gas-fueled—respond to changes in electricity demand, is by no means simple, but it is, in some respects, fairly straight forward. “It was really one-way communications,” says Daniel Schwartz, director of the Clean Energy Institute at the University of Washington, which partnered with the American Jobs Project on the report.

What city ants can teach us about species evolution and climate change

Acorn ants are tiny. They’re not the ants you’d notice marching across your kitchen or swarming around sidewalk cracks, but the species is common across eastern North America. In particular, acorn ants live anywhere you find oak or hickory trees: both in forests and in the hearts of cities.

That’s why they’re so interesting to Sarah Diamond, a biology professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. “We’re comparing this little forest island within a city to traditional forest habitats,” she says. Specifically, she and her colleagues are looking at how well city ants can tolerate higher temperatures compared to their rural cousins. The experiment is made possible by what’s known as the urban heat island effect, which describes the tendency of the built-up infrastructure of cities — think heat-absorbing concrete and asphalt, for example — to create a hotter environment than less developed areas.

Justice Dept. rules intensify crackdown on sanctuary cities

The Justice Department escalated its promised crackdown on so called sanctuary cities in late July, saying it will no longer award coveted grant money to cities unless they give federal immigration authorities access to jails and provide advance notice when someone in the country illegally is about to be released.

Under old rules, cities seeking grant money needed only to show they were not preventing local law enforcement from communicating with federal authorities about the immigration status of people they have detained.

About one billion birds are killed every year when they unwittingly fly into human-made objects such as buildings with reflective windows. Such collisions are the largest unintended human cause of bird deaths worldwide — and they are a serious concern for conservationists.

A new paper published in June in the journal Biological Conservation finds that, as one might suspect, smaller buildings cause fewer bird deaths than do bigger buildings. But the research team of about 60 — including three co-authors with the University of Washington — also found that larger buildings in rural areas pose a greater threat to birds than if those same-sized buildings were located in an urban area.

There’s a map for that

If you own a cell phone or a mobile device you’re likely creating data that could be mapped. “When you add a Yelp review or geotag a tweet you’re actually volunteering geographic information, you are mapping,” said UW Tacoma Assistant Professor Britta Ricker. Most of us use maps to determine our location, to find out how to get from point A to point B. Ricker, who teaches in the university’s master of science in geospatial technologies program, sees maps in a larger context. “This is a skill you can apply to everything,” she said.

Traditionally, only the most highly trained professionals had access to the geographic information systems [GIS] needed to create most maps. The development of smart phones in the late 2000s opened up a world of opportunity. “A lot more people have access to things like GPS and can contribute geographic information using their smart phones,” said Ricker.

The democratization of mapping has major implications for citizen science. “For a long time geographers were constrained by how many researchers we could hire and how much land could be traversed,” said Ricker. “We now have a larger, more diverse group of people with smart phones who can contribute their local observations and data.”

Does commercial zoning increase neighborhood crime?

In the run-up to the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump toldTheNew York Times that America’s urban centers are some of the “most dangerous,” crime-filled places in the world. Even though experts were quick to point out that violent crime has actually declined in all but a handful of America’s largest cities and urban areas, the view of cities as dense, dirty, and dangerous and suburbs as spread out, pastoral, and safe has long pervaded American culture.

MetroLab to hold annual summit in Atlanta

MetroLab Network—a national network of 40 city-university partnerships focused on urban innovation—will be hosting their Annual Summit in Atlanta from September 13-15 (in partnership with the City of Atlanta and Georgia Tech). The Summit will bring together leaders from local government, universities, industry and non-profit and is an opportunity to share, discuss, and present on the impact of data, analytics, and technology on local government. Martin O’Malley (Former Governor of Maryland) and Mayor Pete Buttigieg (South Bend, Indiana) will be keynoting the event (w/ more speakers TBA). Free registration is available for government representatives and discounted registration is available for attendees from non-profits. Questions can be directed to summit@metrolabnetwork.org.

As metro areas grow, whites move farther from the city center

In the middle of the 20th century, cities began to change. The popularity of the automobile and the construction of interstate highways fueled the growth of suburbs, while discriminatory housing policies segregated neighborhoods and helped create the phenomenon of “white flight” away from downtowns.

Decades later, the average white person still lives farther from the city center than the average person of color, a University of Washington researcher says, even with the resurgence of downtown living in many communities and the increasing diversity of suburbs. In an era when the growth in the population of blacks, Latinos and Asians outpaces that of whites nationwide, a new study of who lives where provides insight into the geography of race.

As metro areas grow, whites move farther from the city center

In the middle of the 20th century, cities began to change. The popularity of the automobile and the construction of interstate highways fueled the growth of suburbs, while discriminatory housing policies segregated neighborhoods and helped create the phenomenon of “white flight” away from downtowns.

Decades later, the average white person still lives farther from the city center than the average person of color, a University of Washington researcher says, even with the resurgence of downtown living in many communities and the increasing diversity of suburbs. In an era when the growth in the population of blacks, Latinos and Asians outpaces that of whites nationwide, a new study of who lives where provides insight into the geography of race.

The biggest cliché in tech is hurting cities

If you don’t live in Silicon Valley, chances are you live in its close relative: “the next Silicon Valley.” The label has been slapped with abandon on towns, cities, regions, or sometimes entire countries. All it takes is an uptick in job growth, an influx of startups, or a new coding bootcamp for the cliche to come roaring into headlines and motivational speeches.

In 2008, Margaret O’Mara developed an urge to chronicle this obsession. A Department of History professor at the University of Washington, she’d written a book several years earlier about the search for the next Silicon Valley. The moniker remained as omnipresent as ever, so she hired an undergraduate student to compile every Silicon Valley, Alley, Peak, Beach, Desert, Wadi, Bog, and more. Six weeks later, the student had to concede defeat: There were too many silicon somethings to track. “It’s become this global race. It’s a competitive thing, it’s a branding thing,” says O’Mara. “It’s a way of saying, ‘Look, we are just as forward-thinking and 21st century as everyone else.’”

Partnership with CMMB launches new center on smart, connected communities

China Multimedia Mobile Broadcasting - Vision (CMMB) has awarded the University of Washington Department of Electrical Engineering (UW EE) a $1.5 million gift to establish a new research center. The CMMB Vision-UW Center on Satellite Multimedia and Connected Vehicles will focus on the development of the next generation of smart cars and ubiquitous connectivity.

How a rising minimum wage affects jobs in Seattle

Three years ago, Seattle became one of the first jurisdictions in the nation to embrace a $15-an-hour minimum wage, to be phased in over several years. Over the past week, two studies have purported to demonstrate the effects of the first stages of that increase — but with diverging results.

What the bond between homeless people and their pets demonstrates about compassion

A video camera captures an interview with a man named Spirit, who relaxes in an outdoor plaza on a sunny afternoon. Of his nearby service dogs, Kyya and Miniaga, he says, “They mean everything to me, and I mean everything to them.”In another video, three sweater-clad dogs scamper around a Los Angeles park, while their companion, Judie, tells their backstory. And in still another clip, Myra races her spaniel mix, Prince, down a neighborhood street.

The images have an every-person quality — a collection of random pet owners, explaining why they love their dogs. And that’s part of the point of the series: The people featured are homeless, and a focus on their relationships “humanizes” a population that is often neglected or shunned, according to University of Washington Department of Geography professor Vicky Lawson.

Lawson and her colleague, Wesleyan University postdoctoral researcher Katie Gillespie, studied these videos from the multimedia project My Dog is My Home, created by the New York-based nonprofit of the same name, and wrote about its essential themes for the journal Gender, Place and Culture. Their article, published online June 14, is a call to action, not only for services for homeless people and animals, but also for new understandings of them.

Lake Union building earns awards for energy savings

Henbart LLC announced recently that a year-long study led by the University of Washington’s Integrated Design Lab confirmed that upgrading to View® Dynamic Glass technology in the Lake Union Building significantly saved energy and improved the tenant experience. The report verified annual energy savings of 17.7 percent or 351,604 kWh – roughly $28,000 a year or enough electricity to power 33 homes. The Lake Union Building is a 45-year old building located at 1700 Westlake Avenue N. along the waterfront of Seattle’s Lake Union. Installing the windows was the catalyst to the building receiving LEED EBOM certification this year and awarded the 2015 Visionary Award for Energy by the Seattle 2030 District.

The year-long study led by the University of Washington’s Integrated Design Lab (IDL) was funded by BetterBricks, a commercial resource of the Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance (NEEA), which aims to accelerate the adoption of energy efficiency best practices in the commercial industry.

The mission of Integrated Design Lab is to advance high-performance, energy efficient, and healthy buildings through research and dissemination of best practices in design and technology, said Christopher Meek, Associate Professor of Architecture in The College of Built Environments and Director of the lab. “We are incredibly exited to partner with NEEA evaluate the performance of View Dynamic Glazing under real-world conditions and to share our findings with building owners, designers, and the research community.”

For more information about Chris Meek’s great work, check out our recent interview!

American poverty is moving to the suburbs

In his inaugural address, US president Donald Trump listed out the problems he saw in a declining America. At the top of his list: “Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities.” It was not the first time Trump had spoken of urban poverty. “Our inner cities are a disaster,” Trump said in the third presidential debate of 2016. “You get shot walking to the store. They have no education. They have no jobs.”In addition to their racist undertones, Trump’s statements promote a dangerous misrepresentation of the geography of poverty in the United States.

Over the last several decades, US poverty has increasingly spread to the suburbs. In 1990, the majority of poverty in the 100 largest US metro areas was found in urban areas. But recent research by the political scientist Scott Allard at the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance. shows that, in absolute numbers, this no longer holds true. The University of Washington professor estimates that there are 17 million people living in poverty in the suburbs of the US’s big cities—4 million more than in cities themselves.

Drone vs. truck deliveries: Which creates less carbon pollution?

Delivering packages with drones can reduce carbon dioxide emissions in certain circumstances as compared to truck deliveries, a new study from University of Washington transportation engineers finds. In a paper to be published in an upcoming issue of Transportation Research Part D, researchers found that drones tend to have carbon dioxide emissions advantages over trucks when the drones don’t have to fly very far to their destinations or when a delivery route has few recipients.

Trucks — which can offer environmental benefits by carrying everything from clothes to appliances to furniture in a single trip — become a more climate-friendly alternative when a delivery route has many stops or is farther away from a central warehouse. For small, light packages — a bottle of medicine or a kid’s bathing suit — drones compete especially well. But the carbon benefits erode as the weight of a package increases, since these unmanned aerial vehicles have to use additional energy to stay aloft with a heavy load.

“Flight is so much more energy-intensive — getting yourself airborne takes a huge amount of effort. So I initially thought there was no way drones could compete with trucks on carbon dioxide emissions,” said senior author Anne Goodchild, a UW associate professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering, who also directs the UW Supply Chain Transportation & Logistics Center. “In the end, I was amazed at how energy-efficient drones are in some contexts. Trucks compete better on heavier loads, but for really light packages, drones are awesome.”

To reach Auburn’s island of homelessness, cross this log

That feeling – that investment in services and subsidized housing leads to more homelessness – is a myth, said Lia Musumeci. She’s a University of Washington student who’s working with Auburn on homelessness issues. The project is part of a larger initiative, Livable City Year, a UW program partnering with Auburn to help it as it grows. Musumeci said if Auburn were the only community trying to improve its services, then it could attract more homeless people to move to Auburn from within the region. But Auburn is not alone in its efforts. Homelessness is rooted in the rising cost of living and job instability, she said. We associate those problems with Seattle. They’re problems in Auburn, too, but their effects are easier to overlook there. “It’s so hard for people to understand how grave this problem is,” said Musumeci, because in the suburbs, “a lot of homeless people, especially homeless families, try to hide themselves.” She said that showing people the problem, and telling the stories of people who are homeless, can help.

New Seattle seawall aims to improve waterfront salmon habitat

Seattle’s new $410 million downtown waterfront is also acting as a huge science experiment.If you walk the area from Colman Dock to the Seattle Aquarium, you’d notice glass panels lining the sidewalk.“I thought it was just something to make the pier pretty,” said Emily Fuller, who visiting Seattle with her family.

The panels actually form a light-penetrating sidewalk to make the waterfront more fish-friendly, specifically salmon coming from the Green-Duwamish River into the Sound. “Juvenile salmon don’t like to go into the dark so hopefully it will allow them to move along the shoreline naturally,” said Jeffery Cordell, a University of Washington research scientist in the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences and lead author of the aquatic research of the paneling.

Your neighborhood may be driving you to drink: study

A new study shows that living in poor, “disorganized” neighborhoods matters more when looking at how much alcohol a person drinks than their proximity to bars or stores that sell booze.

The link between poverty and alcoholism is established. But the new research out of the University of Washington throws quality of life into the mix.

“Is there something about the neighborhood itself that can lead to problems?” posed Isaac Rhew, a co-author of the study, and Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and Adjunct Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology . “As we learn more about those neighborhood factors that are relevant, then this might point to strategies to improve the environments where people live.”

The researchers believe that putting programs in place to fix this “disorganization,” which includes crime, drugs and graffiti, can deter lawbreaking, physically clean-up the streets and help a neighborhood afflicted with problem drinking.

Black life is draining out of Seattle, census shows

Tim Thomas

​South King County has long been a place where people with modest incomes could find a home. Now more people are coming, driven by high rents in Seattle. And a University of Washington School of Sociology researcher has found that African-Americans are among the most affected by this wave of displacement. Tim Thomas of the University of Washington discovered the trend while digging deep into Census data. “There’s this massive shift of African-Americans in Seattle moving away from where opportunity or higher-income areas are,” Thomas said.

Urban@UW: What are your current research interests and how do you see them relating to urban issues and cities?

Meek: The Integrated Design Lab (IDL), focuses on three primary activities. One is research: we’re studying high performance buildings, how they perform out in the field, and creating tools for people to be able to better build them. The second facet is technical assistance and project-based research: engaging with design teams that are trying to innovate in their practice, around energy efficiency, high performance buildings, health-design, daylighting, and providing technical simulation support to help them better make those decisions within their firm. The third thing we do is professional education. We partner with the American Institute of Architects andwe’ve done three significant projects in the Puget Sound region that are now pilots for national programs. One is called AIA +2030 Professional Series, teaching people how to design energy-efficient buildings to meet the 2030 Challenge. The second one, which is on a national rollout, is called Getting To Zero. It presents technical, financial and practice opportunities and barriers to the widespread adoption of net-zero-energy buildings. And the third is Materials Matter, which presents current scientific knowledge of the impact of materials on environmental health, on human health and on life-cycle assessment to make better decisions in buildings. Materials Matter was a collaboration with IDL, the Carbon Leadership Forum (led by Prof. Kate Simonen) in the Department of Architecture and the Health Products Declaration Collaborative.

Urban@UW: What specific urban challenges do you see your work addressing?

Meek: In a big picture sense, buildings are responsible for about 40% of the carbon emissions in the US, so pushing for net-zero-energy buildings and low-energy, high-performance buildings contributes to reduction of carbon emissions. They also create higher-quality, healthier places for people to live. I’m interested in health design, and inter-relationships: buildings that support the circadian rhythm through a strong connection to the outside, that have healthy indoor environmental quality through natural ventilation by using climate and ecosystem as a resource—rather than trying to hold those out and use energy for purely mechanical systems.

Urban@UW: What led you to this area of study?

Meek: I started my career in New Orleans, and I worked on a lot of historic buildings and I just fell in love with them. The more that I looked at them and understood them, the more that I realized that many of the aspects that drew me to them, their proportions and relationships were about providing light or allowing fresh air to come through the buildings, to really integrate and connect with the neighborhood and the landscape. Originally in my undergraduate work I was really interested in solar architecture and environmentally sustainable architecture. When I came to UW I met Professor Emeritus Joel Loveland and I started working with him on issues of daylighting and energy efficiency, and I have just taken it from there. I love engaging with practitioners and hearing their ideas and learning what their concerns are, and then bringing those concerns to my teaching and my research—so that it feeds back and then, hopefully in a small way, elevates the practice here.

Urban@UW: Speaking on that, who do you normally work with, who is in your network or who would you like to work with in the future at UW?

Meek: We have a great team at IDL. Every day I work with Heather Burpee, Michael Gilbride, Deborah Sigler, and Tina Dilegge at IDL. Heather Burpee and I work together on virtually everything our lab does, we run the labs operations and get grants. Michael Gilbride does a lot of our simulation work and manages our GSAs. I also work with Rob Peña and Kate. I really enjoy working students; we have between five and ten graduate students in our lab at any given time. I’ve also worked a little bit with Thaisa Way; through Urban@UW she’s helped me connect to a university in China and meet some faculty over there. Our lab has signed a memorandum of understanding to collaborate with a similar lab at Tsinghua University in Beijing. As far as others, I’m excited to make more connections amongst the faculty in CBE and in the broader university. I recently met Prof. Peter Kahn, an environmental psychologist with some really interesting ideas. I need to be pro-active to engage with others at UW since being off-campus most of the time can sometimes be a little isolating.

Urban@UW: Earlier you spoke about going out into the field to see how buildings perform, what do you think is the role of data in enhancing the user experience?

Meek: I think it’s really important, because data can be a good way of understanding how a building is performing operationally in terms of heating and cooling, lighting, ventilation. It can also help us better understand what makes people happy in buildings, or what makes them healthy or makes them more satisfied or more productive. That’s a huge opportunity and I’d love to have more resources to pursue that because it’s expensive.

Urban@UW: What kinds of new data sources can you use in high-performance buildings and other energy efficiency projects?

Meek: Our lab is in the Bullitt Center and it’s pretty heavily instrumented, with devices that track energy use by either device or by pieces of equipment or by circuit. That is a great resource for us; it’s become the basis of a number of research papers we’ve written and projects we’ve done. I think as a demonstration building it provides good evidence for people who want to follow in its path, or ideally exceed it’s performance.

Urban@UW: How integral do you think the role of industry is for understanding and impacting the future of a city?

Meek: It’s huge: if you look at EPA statistics from over 20 years ago the average North American spends 90% of their time indoors. The built environment, cities but especially building interiors, are our new habitat. As building designers, owners, and developers we now have a role in defining the physical setting that basically all human life takes place in. Buildings are large and the way they inhabit the cityscape and the way they interface with the natural world and other things that are really important to us as a species… I think it’s almost impossible to overstate the power of buildings and the urban fabric to impact our lives.

Urban@UW: What do you see coming up next for you?

Meek: Our lab operates on research dollars, I put in proposals all the time, and the ones that succeed forms our research activity. But I know we’re going to be focusing on a project with the City of Seattle’s Office of Sustainability and Environment: they are implementing a policy to tune up buildings every four years. I would also like to do much more in the quantification of occupant impacts, productivity, health outcomes, and behavior change in high-performance buildings. More evidence about the impact that buildings can have in terms of health and productivity. Finding innovative ways to engage with practice is valuable for me as a teacher and researcher, getting feedback from people out on the field who are addressing these problems, understanding what their challenges are and finding ways to incorporate those challenges into my research and teaching and to then again feed back into practice through students that are better attuned to the needs of practice. Understanding what people are doing in practice helps me sharpen my research focus.

Urban@UW: What is on your reading list these days?

Meek: I think reading about the possible good in the world and the possible bad in the world helps take the limits off what I see as possibilities, so I get inspired by fiction. I read a lot of academic papers, so when I have time to read for myself I want to look into the window of people who spend their time imagining things.

Urban@UW: Is there anything else you would like to add?

Meek: I think that if we get to a point where we can truly understand, quantify, and demonstrate the impacts of buildings on our society for social good, architects will never run out of work. Because I think it’s so impactful what we do and the better we can understand that the better we can promote the value that our profession can bring to society.

Written by Shahd Al Baz, Urban@UW Communications Assistant

Urban lifestyles help to protect the Puget Sound ecosystem

As the state of Washington estimates that the Puget Sound area will grow by more than 1.5 million residents within the next two decades. That is expected to have profound effects on the environment as more and more people move to undeveloped areas. Christopher Dunagan with the Puget Sound Institute explains why urban lifestyles help to protect both rural and urban habitat.

Cities Seek Deliverance From the E-Commerce Boom

With a major increase in residential deliveries, new urban delivery challenges have also arrived. That’s due in part to the failures of urban planning and the nature of the trucking business. While matters of public policy like public transit, bike lanes, and walkability fall within the purview of planning boards and municipal departments of transportation, freight has always been a purely private-sector enterprise. That means cities don’t even have reliable data on the number of delivery trucks coursing through their streets. “Metro planning organizations do regular data collection on personal travel. We don’t have that equivalent for freight, and we don’t have good, metropolitan-scale data about goods movement. Surprise surprise, we don’t understand it very well,” says Anne Goodchild, director of the Supply Chain Transportation and Logistics Center at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Recently, the center launched UW’s Urban Freight Lab, a new partnership between the university, the Seattle Department of Transportation, and private-sector delivery companies (including UPS). Founded in the fall, the lab’s job is to begin collecting some of that data. So far, Goodchild and a team of students are measuring dwell time (how long a delivery vehicle has to remain on the street) and failed deliveries (when a driver shows up somewhere to deliver a package but can’t because the recipient isn’t home and a signature is required). It’s the sort of data Seattle hopes to incorporate into an urban goods delivery strategy, one of the cornerstones of a “freight master plan” the city adopted last year.

There is growing recognition in the building industry of the need to track carbon emissions across a building’s full life cycle, said Kate Simonen, architect, structural engineer and UW Associate Professor in the School of Architecture, who leads the carbon forum. But she said industry professionals need better information and guidance on how to implement low-carbon method in practice.

Bellevue, Renton Among Top 100 U.S Cities for Livability

​Watch as King 5 News brings in Branden Born to shed light on the weighting mechanisms employed by a survey recently published on livability.com which ranked Renton and Bellevue among their top 100 cities for livability.

USGS, partners launch a unified, West Coast-wide earthquake early warning system

The U.S. Geological Survey and university, public and private partners held an event April 10 at the University of Washington to introduce the ShakeAlert earthquake early warning program as a unified, West Coast-wide system. The event also introduced the first pilot uses of the earthquake early warning in Washington and Oregon.

The first Pacific Northwest pilot users of the system are Bothell, Wash.-based RH2 Engineering, which will use the alerts to secure municipal water and sewer systems so these structures remain usable after a major quake. Oregon’s first test user, the Eugene Water & Electricity Board, will use alerts to lower water levels in a canal above a residential area in Oregon, and to stop turbines at a river power plant. A parallel launch event was held in Eugene the same day.

“We are thrilled to take the first steps in integrating earthquake early warning into life in the Pacific Northwest,” John Vidale, UW professor of Earth and space sciences and director of the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network. “Our teamwork has made it possible to reach this milestone so quickly.”

Challenging the whiteness of American architecture, in the 1960s and today

That’s the arresting opening sentence of Sharon Egretta Sutton‘s “When Ivory Towers Were Black,” an unusual hybrid of memoir, institutional history and broadside against the entrenched whiteness of the architecture profession in this country.

The institution in question is Columbia University and, in particular, its department of architecture and planning. The time frame is between 1965 and 1976, “mirroring the emergence and denouement of the black power movement,” as Sutton notes. And the narrative is really a two-part story, exploring how an era of intense student protest at Columbia, which peaked in the spring of 1968, gave way to a remarkably successful if short-lived effort to recruit students of color to study architecture and urban planning on the university’s campus in Morningside Heights, on the southwestern edge of Harlem.

That’s the beginning of the story of how Sutton, who is now professor emerita at the University of Washington and a fellow of the American Institute of Architects, became one of those students.

Growing Up in the University District

Vikram Jandhyala sees Seattle’s University District evolving into an “innovation district” — a place where public and private sectors work together to develop socially beneficial technologies. Think Silicon Valley, where Stanford University faculty and students launch new companies or work on their new technologies with existing tech giants.

As the University of Washington’s vice president for innovation strategies and head of the UW CoMotion program, which pairs the research resources of the university with the business resources of the private sector, Jandhyala has already been pushing to make that vision come to life.

“CoMotion’s role is to be a hub, an innovation hub where we can get all these ideas out from the university into the community,” Jandhyala explains.

As Central District gets whiter, new barriers to health care

Last week while lawmakers in Washington, D.C., were gnashing their teeth over what health insurance in the U.S. should look like, patients and providers in King County were wrestling with some of the same challenges they faced before the Affordable Care Act was in place.

In 2014, students in King County who are black, Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander or American Indian/Alaskan Native were twice as likely not to have had a yearly dental check-up.

The creation of the Burke-Gilman Trail

Image Credit: Matthew Rutledge/Flickr, CC BY-2.0.

On Sunday, Sept. 12, 1971, hundreds of people began marching toward Matthews Beach Park along the shores of Lake Washington north of Sand Point. Families, couples, adults and senior citizens converged on the park in two streams – one from the south, one from the north. They marched there that sunny late-summer afternoon along old railroad tracks, on a route that dated to the 1880s. The “hike-in” and rally was organized by UW professor emeritus Merrill Hille to draw attention and create support for turning the old railroad tracks to a bike and pedestrian trail. Elected officials and civic leaders spoke to an estimated crowd of 2,000 people, and the event was a turning point in the history of what became the Burke-Gilman Trail.

First UW Livable City Year project reports delivered to the City of Auburn

Image Credit: UW Livable City Year

Teams of University of Washington students have been working throughout this academic year on livability and sustainability projects in the City of Auburn. The yearlong Livable City Year partnership has given students a chance to work on real-world challenges identified by Auburn, while providing Auburn with tens of thousands of hours of study and student work.

Livable City Year connects UW faculty with projects based in Auburn, which are then incorporated into their classes. The program started this year, partnering with Auburn for the 2016-2017 year. This fall marked the first quarter for the program, when students in seven courses tackled 10 separate projects. The final reports from these projects are now complete.

“The very first Livable City Year projects were a success due to the hard work of our students and faculty, along with crucial guidance from Auburn city staff. It’s been an exciting process of co-creation,” said Livable City Year faculty co-director Branden Born of the Department of Urban Design and Planning. “The student teams working on these projects have worked to provide real benefits for the residents of Auburn, while also gaining real-world experience and a connection to the community.”

Students in Livable City Year courses spend at least one quarter working on a specific project identified as a need by Auburn. The student teams work with Auburn staff and community stakeholders as they conduct research and work on the projects.

Fall projects included assessments of Auburn’s work in reducing homelessness among the community, educational strategies to reduce pet waste and improper household items in wastewater, cultural city mapping, city values outreach, work on community place-making, and more.

“The projects that these students have taken on are at the core of many of our city’s major initiatives,” Auburn mayor Nancy Backus said. “Their work and dedication through the Livable City Year program has helped us make major strides forward in areas that are critical to the health, safety and happiness of our residents.”

After the quarter’s research work is completed, a student or student team works with Livable City Year’s editor and graphic designer to prepare a final report for the city, including any recommendations or possible future steps. By having several coordinated student teams across disciplines working on various projects, the Livable City Year program provides the City of Auburn with ways to enhance sustainability and livability elements within existing and future projects and programs.

While the fall project teams have completed their reports, this winter students have been working on projects including reducing food waste in school cafeterias; researching the costs, challenges and benefits of low-impact development stormwater technology; and better connecting Auburn’s residents socially, culturally, and economically.

Senior Ariel Delos Santos was one of the students in Born’s fall class which looked at connectivity and community place-making in Auburn.

“Working with the LCY program brought a novel component to our educational experience. Instead of a standard classroom setting where our homework is only seen by the professor, our final products were intimately tied to the city and its community members - which greatly motivated us to do more work and be more attentive to those who will be affected,” said Delos Santos, a senior double major in Community, Environment & Planning and Aquatic Fishery & Sciences. “As a student, I loved how closely I was able to work with my peers regularly and the camaraderie that we built. I definitely learned how to maintain professional relationships, accountability, communication, and my natural role in team settings.”

For more information, contact Born at bborn@uw.edu or 206-543-4975; LCY program manager Jennifer Davison at jnfrdvsn@uw.edu or 206-240-6903; and Jenna Leonard, Auburn’s climate and sustainability practice leader, at jleonard@auburnwa.gov or 253-804-5092.

The current Seattle rainstorm, and many like it this year, are overwhelming our city’s wastewater pipes, and some sewage may be dumping into the Puget Sound as we speak. But even in a normal year, King County dumps about 800 million gallons of raw sewage into its waterways. That’s because, when it rains too much in too short a time, “pipes start to flow too full,” School of Public Health professor Scott Meschke says, “and so they start to back up. And, in order to prevent that, you have the overflow. If you didn’t have the [overflow], it would go into people’s basements, or out their toilets.” And with greater probability for extreme weather, this phenomenon will increase, as Guillaume Mauger with UW’s Climate Impacts Group explains.

In the smart cities of the future, posters, signs and clothing may talk back

Image Credit: University of Washington

New research from University of Washington has shown for the first time that ambient FM radio signals can be used as a signal source for wireless communication. The technology, developed by engineers in the Networks & Mobile Systems Lab and Sensor Systems Lab, creates backscatter transmissions that can be decoded on any FM receiver, including those in cars and smartphones. This enabled the researchers, led by students in the two labs, to communicate information to cars and smartphones in outdoor environments, using posters, signs, and even clothing, affixed with minimal conductive material.

Over the next decade, driverless vehicles will make their way along Seattle roadways, possibly bringing relief to one of the most congested cities in the United States. Or, according to a new report out of the University of Washington, they could make things worse. UW’s Tech Policy Lab has partnered with Challenge Seattle to develop this research.

Honoring Women Collaborators at Urban@UW

credit: Jessica Hamilton

In honor of International Women’s Day, we are highlighting just some of UW’s brilliant female professors, scholars, and and change-makers with whom Urban@UW is proud to collaborate. Click on their names to explore their work.

Universities establish joint center to use data for social good in Cascadia region

University of British Columbia, left, and University of Washington, right, have formed the Cascadia Urban Analytics Cooperative with the help of Microsoft.

In an expansion of regional cooperation, the University of British Columbia and the University of Washington today announced the establishment of the Cascadia Urban Analytics Cooperative to use data to help cities and communities address challenges from traffic to homelessness. The largest industry-funded research partnership between UBC and the UW, the collaborative will bring faculty, students and community stakeholders together to solve problems, and is made possible thanks to a $1-million gift from Microsoft.

“Thanks to this generous gift from Microsoft, our two universities are poised to help transform the Cascadia region into a technological hub comparable to Silicon Valley and Boston,” said Professor Santa J. Ono, President of the University of British Columbia. “This new partnership transcends borders and strives to unleash our collective brain power, to bring about economic growth that enriches the lives of Canadians and Americans as well as urban communities throughout the world.”

“We have an unprecedented opportunity to use data to help our communities make decisions, and as a result improve people’s lives and well-being. That commitment to the public good is at the core of the mission of our two universities, and we’re grateful to Microsoft for making a community-minded contribution that will spark a range of collaborations,” said UW President Ana Mari Cauce.

Julian Agyeman: A Brief Reading List

Urban@UW and Julian Agyeman

Julian Agyeman, Professor of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University, will be delivering a talk at the University of Washington on February 28 at 7:30pm. Agyeman was originally trained as an ecologist and biogeographer before turning to critical urban studies and environmental social science. Agyeman’s scholarship challenges basic notions of sustainability through his concept of ‘just sustainabilities,’ which aims to enhance equity and justice for both humans and ecosystems, now and into the future. In anticipation of his visit, Urban@UW has compiled a brief reading list.

Julian Agyeman and Duncan McLaren challenge the notion that connectivity, apps, and sensors mean enhanced livability for everyone by indicating they can also risk sidestepping inclusive politics. Agyeman and McLaren argue that truly smart cities need to use technology that bolsters possibilities for political participation, sharing, and inclusion, instead of market driven solutions that threaten urban equity.

Agyeman traces the evolution of and responses to the term environmental justice across international lines in response to differing racial, social, and classist circumstances surrounding inequalities. Agyeman posits that environmental justice is increasingly becoming a human rights issue rather than an American-centric civil rights issue

The emergence of food justice has had profound implications for both theory and activism. Food justice’s aspirations for going local in order to challenge the inequities of large-scale agri-business can unfortunately create its own fields of exclusion through high craft, expensive, local food items or cultivate a culture around local food that is available only to those with the financial means. Agyeman and Jesse McEntee argue that urban political ecology can offer a lens to critically focus on possibilities for retooling approaches to the food justice problem.

Compiled by Andrew Prindle & Urban@UW.

Drones Are Turning Civilians Into an Air Force of Citizen Scientists

Last winter, as meteorologists warned of a monster El Niño, researchers at the Nature Conservancy in California prepared to mobilize with a new, distributed surveillance strategy: commercial drones, co-opted from a gung-ho statewide network of citizen scientists. Britta Ricker, geographic information scientist in Urban Studies University of Washington-Tacoma, shares her thoughts about the challenges and rewards of this new research strategy.

Transportation routing services primarily designed for people in cars don’t give pedestrians, parents pushing bulky strollers or people in wheelchairs much information about how to easily navigate a neighborhood using sidewalks.

On Wednesday AccessMap – a University of Washington project spearheaded by the Taskar Center for Accessible Technology — launched a new online travel planner offering customizable suggestions for people who need accessible or pedestrian-friendly routes when getting from point A to B in Seattle.

Working with community to tackle homelessness

Seattle’s rapid rise in homelessness, coinciding with increasing costs in housing and living, have brought significant challenges to economically vulnerable populations in the Puget Sound. In spite of a sense of urgency regionally and in many areas of the country, sufficient resources, effective systemic fixes and broad support still have not come together to end homelessness.

As a research and teaching institution, the University of Washington seeks to develop strategies to address the problems facing citizens experiencing homelessness. These efforts include developing rigorous research questions and projects, analyzing the barriers to housing, and working with practitioners and civic leaders to find sustainable solutions.

University of Washington faculty and students are now looking to how we might expand our capabilities and our connections with communities to collaboratively work to mitigate the effects of homelessness, improve access to and retention of housing, and contribute to ending homelessness.

As policymakers, communities, and practitioners consider changes in priorities and services to address the recently accelerated rise in homelessness, new research questions and needs arise requiring ethical monitoring and the implementation of productive and effective measures. This presents both an opportunity and challenge for the University of Washington.

One effort to build on the UW’s work includes Urban@UW working in collaboration with the West Coast Poverty Center and other key partners to catalogue existing homelessness-related projects and research across the University’s departments and centers, in order to gain insights into strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities. A faculty retreat in fall 2016 brought together researchers and practitioners from across UW’s three campuses to share information and develop new projects.

Connecting researchers from various and occasionally disparate fields is essential to fostering new collaborations capable of advancing thinking at a rate commensurate with the challenge at hand. By building a network of current initiatives we aim to facilitate the development of new opportunities for those interested in participating; and foster research that improves data analytics, evaluates policies and strategies, and addresses the barriers to housing for the diverse populations experiencing homelessness.

As part of increasing research and data analytic approaches to homelessness, Urban@UW organized a workshop at the 8th International Conference on Social Informatics conference in downtown Bellevue, WA in November 2016. Local and national researchers presented their work on technological and data-driven solutions to improve services, understand population processes, and develop effective community interaction with persons experiencing homelessness.

Additionally, on January 17 and 18, the MetroLab Network, a national city-university network hosted by the City of Seattle and the University of Washington, met in Seattle City Hall for a Big Data and Human Services Workshop. Keynote speakers and breakout discussions explored ways to direct research and technology to improve services while addressing income inequality, health, mobility, and homelessness. The School of Social Work will be Urban@UW’s partner in addition to others as we move forward in this arena.

Many UW faculty staff and students work, and many have worked for decades, in different ways to end or ameliorate the effects of homelessness. Urban@UW takes the challenge of how to propel this work forward and, though smarter collaboration, increase effectiveness. As UW and Urban@UW build a collective homelessness initiative, we look forward to more opportunities for community stakeholders to participate. Keep an eye out for updates from Urban@UW and the University of Washington regarding these issues. If would like more targeted communication about homelessness, please consider joining our mailing list, or our listserv for urban-related information and events. Any questions may be sent to urbanuw@uw.edu.

“What we really found we needed was a unit on campus that could support the longer term investments in the data science for social good urban space,” Howe said. “Advancing the success of this family of partner projects … all around the area of urban data is really the mission of Urbanalytics.”

Originally posted at the UW Daily; Urban@UW is a partner catalyzing the Urbanalytics project.

The plan to test cities’ sewage for drugs: mass surveillance?

Nearly every drug you ingest eventually ends up back in the water supply via your excrement. The fish love it—well, maybe not the ones mutating from it. But apparently crabs and trout aren’t the only ones sifting through your waste.

Across the globe, researchers at wastewater treatment plants are testing for psychoactive substances passed by drug users through their feces and urine. The data can be incredibly valuable, letting scientists and law enforcement quickly track drug use trends and identify new substances on the market. It can also measure the impact of drug policy strategies, even highlight which days of the week drug use spikes. For example, Dr. Caleb Banta-Green, a senior researcher at the University of Washington’s Alcohol and Drug Abuse Institute has been scouring wastewater for drugs in King County and elsewhere for eight years.

But with this research comes some ethical entanglements. Testing waste could help anticipate the sharp rise in carfentanil or fentanyl overdoses, for example, by detecting the drug in sewage. But the same strategies can be used to stigmatize against certain populations, and as we’ve seen with the War on Drugs in the US, this could have lasting consequences for those communities.

UW students get a lesson in homelessness with Tent City 3

Lois Thetford, a University of Washington faculty member, called out in a low voice as she and three UW students made their way through closely spaced, tarp-covered tents that make up Tent City 3 — the long-running tent encampment that recently moved to the UW campus.
The temperature hovered near freezing, with a brisk wind blowing from the west. Most of the campers huddled in their tents, pitched in the UW parking lot that will be their home for the next three months. The camp was almost completely silent — it was impossible to know which tents were inhabited and which were empty.

Yet as Thetford and her students passed, a hand poked out of an opening in one tent, and a woman’s voice from inside said: “Socks are always good. Thank you.”

The next stop was the food tent, where Chris Pitre, a student studying to be a physician assistant, chatted with Jeff Bainter, a restaurant cook and Tent City camper. Did he have any medical issues?

“I have this horrible cough, a persistent, horrible cough,” Bainter said. Pitre reached for his stethoscope.

The UW began hosting the homeless camp in early January, and it’s believed to be the first time that a major public university has ever hosted a tent city on its campus.

Big data to help human services: Topic of UW, City of Seattle event Jan. 17

Using big data to address human services ― including health, foster care and the challenges of homelessness ― will be the focus of a workshop next week at Seattle City Hall hosted by the University of Washington and City of Seattle along with MetroLab Network, a recent White House initiative to improve cities through university-city partnerships.

The event begins on Jan. 17 with remarks from UW President Ana Mari Cauce, Seattle Deputy Mayor Kate Joncas, former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley and former Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire. Trish Millines Dziko, founder and director of the Technology Access Foundation, will address how to mentor the next generation of leaders.

In the afternoon, representatives from Microsoft, the City of Chicago and several academic institutions will discuss how data science can be incorporated into more efficient and effective urban human services.

MetroLab Network, which launched in fall 2015 as part of the White House Smart Cities Initiative, includes more than 40 university-city partnerships that will focus on the research, development and deployment of projects that offer technologically and analytically based solutions to challenges facing urban areas. Over the next year, MetroLab members will develop solutions in four areas, called “labs”: water and green infrastructure; sensors; traffic and transportation; and big data and human services.The Seattle-UW partnership is one of the founding members of MetroLab and will focus in part on pairing academic researchers with city leaders to address homelessness issues as well as transportation. Next week’s event will also include a day of workshops for researchers and human services experts to make connections on existing projects and identify priorities for the partnership.

Work will continue after the meeting as MetroLab members focus on opportunities for collaborative research and scalable projects. The workshop will also consider which tools and materials ― data-sharing standards, white papers, software ― would be broadly beneficial to city-university efforts. Urban@UW, the UW’s eScience Institute and Urbanalytics are several university groups that will play a large role in the partnership.

The water and green infrastructure lab kicked off in October 2016 with a workshop in Washington, D.C., and the other labs will begin work in 2017.

The combination of civic and public entities leveraging data for increased efficiency and novel applications. These new approaches create occasionally contested territory where calls for transparency and openness are met with deep concerns over privacy and security. Calo, et al, engaged in “cross-disciplinary assessments of an open municipal government system” using Seattle, WA as a case study for future possibilities.

Crosscut offers a profile of Trish Dziko, co-founder of University of Washington’s Technology Access Foundation, looking at the impacts of her career in technology and working to collapse gaps in gender and race in the world of technology.

A podcast, produced by The Department of Better Technology, which assists governments in enhanced software delivery systems and platforms, interviews Justin Erlich of UC Berkeley and Special Assistant Attorney General to the California Department of Justice, discuss Kamala Harris’s OpenJustice platform and the implications of open data for justice transparency issues.

Amen Ra Mashariki, Chief Analytics Officer in New York City’s Office of Data and Analytics, is interviewed by GovTech Magazine about New York City’s data explorations and impacts on businesses, efficiencies, and potential evolutions.

Shannon Mattern, associate professor in the School of Media Studies at The New School, offers a critical perspective on possibilities for smart cities through a discrete focus on how citizens might physically interact with these systems.

Barbosa et al. explore the emergence of open urban data initiatives across North America. An analysis of over 9,000 open data sets considers data integration opportunities and data quality issues associated with this new approach to public information.

This paper describes the inaugural offering of the eScience Institutes Data Science for Social Good program, modeled after the University of Chicago program of the same name. Writers reflect on the process of organizing and structuring a program that brings together students and practitioners with varying backgrounds and experiences to design, develop, and deploy new solutions to high-impact problems in the Seattle Metro Area.

NextCity highlights benefits and important considerations in regard to tools developed by nonprofit data analytics firm SumAll, which uses data to help social workers decide where to focus their efforts.

City of Chicago Chief Data Officer, Tom Schenk Jr., opines in Open Resource Magazine that similar to start-ups and large companies, cities are poised to leverage big data - from Twitter to the Array of Things, to improve efficiency of their services.

In 2015, the Metrolab Network was announced as a part of the Obama Administration’s new “Smart Cities” Initiative to help local communities tackle key challenges such as reducing traffic congestion, fighting crime, fostering economic growth, managing the effects of a changing climate, and improving the delivery of city services.

Songbirds divorce, flee, fail to reproduce due to suburban sprawl

Suburban development is forcing some songbirds to divorce, pack up and leave and miss their best chances for successful reproduction.

As forested areas increasingly are converted to suburbs, birds that live on the edge of our urban footprint must find new places to build their nests, breed and raise fledglings. New research published Dec. 28 in the journal PLOS ONE finds that for one group of songbirds — called “avoiders” — urban sprawl is kicking them out of their territory, forcing divorce and stunting their ability to find new mates and reproduce successfully, even after relocating.

“The hidden cost of suburban development for these birds is that we force them to do things that natural selection wouldn’t have them do otherwise,” said lead author John Marzluff, a professor of wildlife science in the University of Washington’s School of Environmental and Forest Sciences.

UW-led study shows new global evidence of the role of humans, urbanization in rapid evolution

It has long been suspected that humans and the urban areas we create are having an important — and surprisingly current and ongoing — effect on evolution, which may have significant implications for the sustainability of global ecosystems.

A new multi-institution study led by the University of Washington that examines 1,600 global instances of phenotypic change — alterations to species’ observable traits such as size, development or behavior — shows more clearly than ever that urbanization is affecting the genetic makeup of species that are crucial to ecosystem health and success.

New wood technology may offer hope for struggling timber

John Redfield watches with pride as his son moves a laser-guided precision saw the size of a semi-truck wheel into place over a massive panel of wood.

Redfield’s fingers are scarred from a lifetime of cutting wood and now, after decades of decline in the logging business, he has new hope that his son, too, can make a career shaping the timber felled in southern Oregon’s forests.

That’s because Redfield and his son work at D.R. Johnson Lumber Co., one of two U.S. timber mills making a new wood product that’s the buzz of the construction industry. It’s called cross-laminated timber, or CLT, and it’s made like it sounds: rafts of 2-by-4 beams aligned in perpendicular layers, then glued — or laminated — together like a giant sandwich.

The resulting panels are lighter and less energy-intensive than concrete and steel and much faster to assemble on-site than regular timber, proponents say. Because the grain in each layer is at a right angle to the one below and above it, there’s a counter-tension built into the panels that supporters say makes them strong enough to build even the tallest skyscrapers.

Imagine a transportation system that could move you from place to place faster than a jet plane, without ever leaving the ground — a system that could take you from Seattle to Portland in just 15 minutes.

In a chilly warehouse near Lake Union, a group of University of Washington students is trying to solve some of the engineering puzzles tied to inventor Elon Musk’s dream of a hyperloop, a theoretical new form of travel.

They’re among the 30 finalists in a collegiate competition to build a hyperloop pod — a capsule for carrying passengers in the tubes envisioned by Musk, of SpaceX and Tesla.

UW professor: Seattle exposed to most ‘chronically high noise levels’ of any city in US

How Seattle’s development is impacting your health and, more specifically, your ears is not something being taken into account by city leaders, according to a University of Washington professor. And changing an ordinance that mutes construction’s noise pollution to match other cities from around the country might be a potent elixir, he says.

Eliot Brenowitz, a professor of psychology and biology at UW, co-authored a piece for Crosscut that says Seattle residents are “being exposed to some of the most chronically high noise levels from construction of any city in the nation.” And while he is concerned, he told KIRO Radio’s Jason and Burns that the title of the Crosscut piece, “Seattle’s construction noise is out of control — and deadly,” is not what he had in mind.

Reflections on Urban Environmental Justice in a Time of Climate Change

​Photo by: David de la Cruz

​On November 7th and 8th Urban@UW, in collaboration with the University of Washington’s Climate Impacts Group (CIG), hosted a symposium to begin transdisciplinary conversation on the multifaceted dynamics and consequences of Urban Environmental Justice in a Time of Climate Change (UEJ). Below are some reflections from this event, and a sample of the resources we’ll be sharing from our time together.

Urban environmental justice has been impacting cities for centuries, if not millennia, where unequal power distribution creates disparate living conditions that typically fall along racial, ethnic, and class lines. Climate change is expected to accelerate already existing injustices in vulnerable communities. Flooding islands and coastlines, drought conditions, erosion, aridity, and soil loss are already impacting multitudes of marginalized as well as traditionally subsistence and agricultural communities.

Jacqui Patterson, Director of the NAACP Environmental and Climate Justice Program, argued during her Walker-Ames lecture that these communities are the proverbial canaries in the coal mine, but that impacts will not be isolated to such communities. Rather, given time and continued inaction, people of all races and classes will invariably experience the hardships wrought by the adverse conditions of climate change.

Given the scale of impacts of these challenges, a major goal of the UEJ symposium was to gather community leaders, academics, and the public to begin learning from each other on the topic of urban environmental justice: what are you studying, what are you finding, what’s working and what’s not, what partnerships could be made? Perhaps most critically, how does academia engage with communities and institutions in a way that is not only respectful, but collaborative and community-driven?

Scholars and community members gathered on 11/8/16. Photo by: David de la Cruz

While academics have been working on environmental justice issues for decades, this work too often tends to operate within the confines of the academy and overlooks stakeholder input. Speakers at the UEJ symposium, experts in this field, explained that this tendency leads to insulated input from those most affected, and further confines data and analysis to traditional quantitative information such as geospatial data, census results, and other forms of ‘hard data.’ This pattern thus restricts the inclusion of “non-traditional” forms of data, notably those understandings drawn from the lived experiences of those most affected. Therefore the goal is not simply to include more types of information, but to combine quantitative and qualitative data through collaboration between researchers and communities in order to more robustly and comprehensively document injustices in a way that allows legibility, participation, and engagement of a greater diversity of people, scholars, and community members.

A further challenge comes in addressing the deep structural issues of racism, sexism, and classism that pervade the behavior of some communities as well as larger social and political institutions. Tom Goldtooth, director of Indigenous Environmental Network, spoke to us via live audio feed from Standing Rock and made clear to the audience that although the scale of this particular protest may be significant, this is just an example of the repeatedly lived experiences for disenfranchised peoples wherein the needs and actions of state actors and/or corporations are able to avoid repercussions of land seizure, pollution, or treaty infringements.

Furthermore, the scope of injustices is not simply urban. While cities have increasingly been the focus of a trove of writing on the topic, a more accurate perspective must recognize that urban does not simply mean “city” – but should better refer to the regions that urban, peri-urban, and rural communities all participate in. While cities may have denser populations, environmental justice persists across the entire spectrum of environments. Julie Sze, professor and Chair of American Studies at UC-Davis, explained the demarcations of neighborhood, town, or city all fail to account for the scale of consequences of climate change effects and environmental injustices, and argued for the necessity of deep, inclusive collaboration and communication.

Many visiting scholars and panelists, including Mia White, Rachel Morello-Frosch, Kim Powe, and Jill Mangaliman, indicated that environmental injustices are not rooted in isolated moments of conflict, but rather are the result of a sustained conflict where market forces and structural disenfranchisement may repeatedly infringe upon sovereignty, food systems, human health and well-being, and environmental integrity. Discovering points of action in these complex issues will require that academics and others collapse the usual barriers of collaboration and information access.

Looking forward, the conversation among scholars, activists and other attendees argued that a failure to reach across usual lines—of discipline, sector, class, race, gender, and other differences—will effect the continued, critical loss of skills and experiences for both students and scholars, that may be compounded by a collective loss for the academy and their communities to know and learn from each other. Scientists, policymakers, community members and others can make it so their work is not only collaborative, but inclusive and broadly informed.

Below is a selection of readings from the speakers who joined us for this event. More resources, including video from the event, will be published soon.

Urban@UW hosted the Urban Environmental Justice in a Time of Climate Change Symposium together with the Climate Impacts Group, and was a sponsor for the Graduate School’s Walker Ames lecture featuring Jacqui Patterson.

Livable City Year releases RFP, invites cities to partner for 2017-8 academic year

The University of Washington’s Livable City Year initiative is now accepting proposals from cities, counties, special districts and regional partnerships to partner with during the 2017-2018 academic year.

UW Livable City Year (UW LCY) connects University of Washington faculty and students with a municipal partner for a full academic year to work on projects fostering livability. The municipal partner will
identify a selection of projects in their community that could be addressed by UW LCY courses. Areas of focus include environmental sustainability, economic viability, population health, and social equity, inclusion and access.

Welcoming the residents of Tent City 3

Winter is approaching, and with it the need for shelter for our neighbors who find themselves without permanent housing only grows.

Earlier this year, at the request of the Tent City Collective – a group of students, alumni and Tent City 3 residents – our University engaged in a public process to assess whether we should host Tent City 3 for 90 days during the winter quarter. As a result of your feedback, and thanks to the work of students, faculty and staff, in June it was announced that the UW will indeed host TC3.

Techstars Teams with Amazon for Alexa Startup Accelerator in Seattle

Alexa, what’s the epicenter of innovation in speech as the new user interface?

A good case can be made for Seattle, following an announcement today from Techstars and Amazon.

Techstars, a top-tier startup accelerator with locations around the world and a major presence in Seattle since 2010, will begin a second program here next year in partnership with Amazon’s Alexa Fund. The aim is to attract and support “early-stage companies advancing the state-of-the-art in voice-powered technologies, interfaces and applications, with a focus on Alexa domains such as connected home, wearables and hearables, enterprise, communication devices, connected car and health and wellness,” writes Techstars’ executive director Cody Simms in a blog post.

Amazon launched the $100 million Alexa Fund in mid-2015 to back companies pushing the frontiers of voice technology and to support an ecosystem around Alexa, the intelligence that powers voice-enabled devices like the Amazon Echo. The fund has backed 22 companies so far, according to a blog post by Douglas Booms, Amazon’s vice president of worldwide corporate development.

UW, City of Seattle and MetroLab Network to host workshop on big data and human services

On January 17, 2017 the City of Seattle, MetroLab Network and the University of Washington will convene experts from local government and universities to discuss common challenges and propose collaborative, data-driven solutions to human service issues. Work will continue after the meeting as members focus on opportunities for collaborative research, and scalable projects. The workshop will also consider which tools and materials (data sharing standards, white papers, software) would be broadly beneficial to city- and county-university efforts.

‘You can’t escape’: Clouds of filth are choking Asia’s cities

The winter air in Tehran is often foul but for six days last week it was hardly breathable. A dense and poisonous chemical smog made up of traffic and factory fumes, mixed with construction dust, burning vegetation and waste has shrouded buildings, choked pedestrians, forced schools and universities to close, and filled the hospitals.

Anyone who could flee the Iranian mega-city of 15 million people has done so, but, say the authorities, in the past two weeks more than 400 people have died as a direct result of the pollution, known as the Asian “brown cloud”.

To Californians: The Hours You Spend in Traffic May Soon Be Used to Generate Electricity

LOS ANGELES, CA - If you’re a Los Angeles native, resident or even visitor, you will probably cringe at the combination of “LA” and “rush hour.” Sitting in LA traffic is an excruciatingly painful task, and not just because of the hours you spend putting pressure on your lower back. If your brakes aren’t screeching because of the driver who just cut you off, then you’re probably yelling about the bumper-to-bumper deadlock.

Truth be told, traffic is infuriating, exhausting and unproductive. However, the California Energy Commission (CEC) has announced its plans to change the latter of the three.

In a new pilot program, the CEC invested $2 million to study whether or not piezoelectric crystals, which would be installed under the asphalt, can be used to turn some of the most congested freeways in the country into a useful alternative resource.